Spender, Stephen. The Temple. Harper and Row Publishers, 1987.
Reason read: June is Pride month. Read in honor of love, no matter how you find it.
To know that The Temple is a semi-autobiographical fiction gives weight to Spender’s words. Most everything that happens to the main character, poet Paul Schoner, in The Temple is something that happened to Spender in and around 1929. He thinly disguises his relationship with other writers (most significantly W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood) as he travels to Hamburg from Oxford. It is important to remember that in the 1920s censorship was prevalent in England. As a homosexual, Spender needed to live his life in lies. His true identity was hidden like a secret. Germany in 1929, while more forgiving about lifestyles, was also going through its own dark period. Spender includes the growing sense of foreboding as Hitler comes to power. Though fascists and Nazis Spender paints a picture of a society that foregoes the history of friendship for the sake of power. It’s violent ending is a sign of dark days ahead.
Author fact: Spender was the first non-American to serve as Consultant in Poetry in English to the Library of Congress.
Book trivia: The Temple could be a movie.
Setlist: Cole Porter’s “Let’s Fall in Love”, Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, Wagner’s Ring cycle, Beethoven, and Schubert.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Oxford” (p 170). As an aside, I am not sure I would have included this in the Oxford chapter. I would have thought it more appropriate it a chapter on Germany or homosexuality.
~*LunaSea*~ 